‘David Brubaker?’ I said. ‘I know him.’ Which was partially
true. I knew him by reputation. He was a real hairy-assed
Special Forces evangelist. According to him the rest of us could
fold our tents and go home and the whole world could hide
behind his hand-picked units. Maybe some helicopter battalions
could stay in harness, to ferry his people around. Maybe a
single Pentagon office could stay open, to procure the weapons
he wanted.
‘When will he be back?’ I said.
‘Sometime tomorrow.’
‘Did you call him?’
The captain shook his head. ‘He won’t want to be involved.
And he won’t want to talk to you. But I’ll get him to reissue
some operational safety procedures, as soon as we find out what
kind of an accident it was.’
‘Crushed by a truck,’ I said. ‘That’s what it was. That should
make him happy. Vehicular safety is a shorter section than
weapons safety.’
‘In what?’
‘In the field manual.’
The captain smiled.
150
‘Brubaker doesn’t use the field manual,’ he said.
‘I want to see Carbone’s quarters,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Because I need to sanitize them. If I’m going to sign off on a
trLck accident, I don’t want any loose ends around.’
Carbone had bunked the same way as his unit as a whole, on
his own in one of the old cells. It was a six-by-eight space made
of painted concrete and it had its own sink and toilet. It had a
standard army cot and a footlocker and a shelf on the wall as
long as the bed. All in all, it was pretty good accommodations
for a sergeant. There were plenty around the world who would
have traded in the blink of an eye.
Summer had had police tape stuck across the doorway. I
pulled it down and balled it up and put it in my pocket. Stepped
inside the room.
Special Forces Detachment D is very different from the
rest of the army in its approach to discipline and uniformity.
Relationships between the ranks are very casual. Nobody
even remembers how to salute. Tidiness is not prized. Uniform
is not compulsory. If a guy feels comfortable in a previous
issue fatigue jacket that he’s had for years, he wears it. If
he likes New Balance running shoes better than GI combat
boots, he wears them. If the army buys four hundred thousand
Beretta sidearms, but the Delta guy likes SIGs better, he uses a
SIG.
So Carbone had no closet full of clean and pressed uniforms.
There were no serried ranks of undershirts, crisp and
laundered, folded ready for use. There were no gleaming boots
under his bed. His clothing was all piled on the first three
quarters of the long shelf above his cot. There wasn’t much of
it. It was all basically olive green, but apart from that it wasn’t
stuff that a current quartermaster would recognize. There were
some old pieces of the army’s original extended cold-weather
clothing system. There were some faded pieces of standard
BDUs.Nothing was marked with unit or regimental insignia.
There was a green bandanna. There were some old green
T-shirts, washed so many times they were nearly transparent.
There was a neatly rolled ALICE harness next to the T-shirts.
151
ALICE stands for All-Purpose Lightweight Carrying Equipment,
which is what the army calls a nylon belt that you hang things
from.
The final quarter of the shelf’s length held a collection of
books, and a small colour photograph in a brass frame. The
photograph was of an older woman that looked a little like
Carbone himself. His mother, without a doubt. I remembered
his tattoo, sliced across by the K-bar. An eagle, holding a scroll
with Mother on it. I remembered my mother, shooing us away
into the tiny elevator after we had hugged her goodbye.
I moved on to Carbone’s books.
There were five paperbacks and one tall thin hardcover. I
ran my finger along the paperbacks. I didn’t recognize any of
the titles or any of the authors. They all had cracked concave
spines and yellow-edged pages. They all seemed to be adventure
stories involving prototype airplanes or lost submarines.
The lone hardcover was a souvenir publication from a Rolling